As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Friday, 18 March 2016

Unique beak evolved with tool use in New Caledonian crow

Date: March 15, 2016

Source: CornellUniversity

Cornell researchers have quantified what
makes the New Caledonian crow's beak different and how it got that way. Their
findings were published March 9, 2016 in the journal Scientific Reports.

It was as plain as the beak on a bird's
face. Cornell ornithologist and crow expert Kevin McGowan recalls the day in
the late 1990s when he first saw stuffed specimens of the New Caledonian crow.

"I remember saying to a student, 'I
don't know what this bird does, but it does something different from any other
corvid on Earth because its bill is so weird,'" said McGowan, project
manager for distance learning in bird biology at the Cornell Lab of
Ornithology.

In 2000, McGowan read a paper by Gavin
Hunt, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, on
tool use by these crows and he had an insight into the New Caledonian crow's
unusual beak.

Now, Hunt, McGowan and a team of
scientists from Japan
have quantified what makes the New Caledonian crow's beak different and how it
got that way. Their findings were published March 9, 2016 in the
journal Scientific Reports.

"We used shape analysis and CT
[computer tomography] scanning to compare the shape and structure of the New
Caledonian crow's bill with some of its crow relatives and a woodpecker species
with a similar foraging niche," said lead author Hunt.

"This study shows that the unique
bill contributes to the birds' ability to use and probably make tools," he
said. "We argue that the beak became specialized for tool manipulation
once the birds began using tools, and that this enhanced tool manipulation
ability may have allowed the crows to make more complex tools."